But his fixation on women had long predated his cancer. He had always prowled for women and regarded them in highly sexualized and demeaning terms. So Sarah’s account of Carlos in the group, shocking as it was, did not astonish me. I knew he was entirely capable of such gross behavior—and worse.
But how should I handle the situation with him in the next hour? Above all, I wished to protect and maintain our relationship. We were making progress, and right now I was his primary human connection. But it was also important that he continue attending his therapy group. I had placed him in a group six weeks ago to provide him with a community that would both help to penetrate his isolation and also, by identifying and urging him to alter some of his most socially objectionable behavior, help him to create connections in his social life. For the first five weeks, he had made excellent use of the group but, unless he changed his behavior dramatically, he would, I was certain, irreversibly alienate all the group members—if he hadn’t done so already!
Our next session started uneventfully. Carlos didn’t even mention the group but, instead, wanted to talk about Ruth, an attractive woman he had just met at a church social. (He was a member of a half-dozen churches because he believed they provided him with ideal pickup opportunities.) He had talked briefly to Ruth, who then excused herself because she had to go home. Carlos said goodbye but later grew convinced that he had missed a golden opportunity by not offering to escort her to her car; in fact, he had persuaded himself that there was a fair chance, perhaps a ten- to fifteen-percent chance, he might have married her. His self-recriminations for not having acted with greater dispatch continued all week and included verbal self-assaults and physical abuse—pinching himself and pounding his head against the wall.
I didn’t pursue his feelings about Ruth (although they were so patently irrational that I decided to return to her at some point) because I thought it was urgent that we discuss the group. I told him that I had spoken to Sarah about the meeting. “Were you,” I asked, “going to talk about the group today?”
“Not particularly, it’s not important. Anyway, I’m going to stop that group. I’m too advanced for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone is dishonest and playing games there. I’m the only person there with enough guts to tell the truth. The men are all losers—they wouldn’t be there otherwise. They’re jerks with no
cojones,
they sit around whimpering and saying nothing.”
“Tell me what happened in the meeting from your perspective.”
“Sarah talked about the rape, she tell you that?”
I nodded.
“And Martha did, too. That Martha. God, that’s one for you. She’s a mess, a real sickie, she is. She’s a mental case, on tranquilizers. What the hell am I doing in a group with people like her anyway? But listen to me. The important point is that they talked about their rapes, both of them, and everyone just sat there silently with their mouths hanging open. At least I responded. I asked them questions.”
“Sarah suggested that some of your questions were not of the helpful variety.”
“Someone had to get them talking. Besides, I’ve always been curious about rape. Aren’t you? Aren’t all men? About how it’s done, about the rape victim’s experience?”
“Oh, come on, Carlos, if that’s what you were after, you could have read about it in a book. These were real people there—not sources of information. There was something else going on.”
“Maybe so, I’ll admit that. When I started the group, your instructions were that I should be honest in expressing my feelings in the group. Believe me, I swear it, in the last meeting I was the only honest person in the group. I got turned on, I admit it. It’s a fantastic turn-on to think of Sarah getting screwed. I’d love to join in and get my hands on those boobs of hers. I haven’t forgiven you for preventing me from dating her.” When he had first started the group six weeks ago, he talked at great length about his infatuation with Sarah—or rather with her breasts—and was convinced she would be willing to go out with him. To help Carlos become assimilated in the group, I had, in the first few meetings, coached him on appropriate social behavior. I had persuaded him, with difficulty, that a sexual approach to Sarah would be both futile and unseemly.
“Besides, it’s no secret that men get turned on by rape. I saw the other men in the group smiling at me. Look at the porno business! Have you ever taken a good look at the books and videotapes about rape or bondage? Do it! Go visit the porno shops in the Tenderloin—it’d be good for your education. They’re printing those things for somebody—there’s gotta be a market out there. I’ll tell you the truth,
if rape were legal, I’d do it
—once in a while.”
Carlos stopped there and gave me a smug grin—or was it a poke-in-the-arm leer, an invitation to take my place beside him in the brotherhood of rapists?
I sat silently for several minutes trying to identify my options. It was easy to agree with Sarah: he
did
sound depraved. Yet I was convinced part of it was bluster, and that there was a way to reach something better, something higher in him. I was interested in, grateful for, his last few words: the “once in a while.” Those words, added almost as an afterthought, seemed to suggest some scrap of self-consciousness or shame.
“Carlos, you take pride in your honesty in the group—but were you really being honest? Or only part honest, or easy honest? It’s true, you were more open than the other men in the group. You did express some of your real sexual feelings. And you do have a point about how widespread these feelings are: the porno business must be offering something which appeals to impulses all men have.
“But are you being completely honest? What about all the other feelings going on inside you that you
haven’t
expressed? Let me take a guess about something: when you said ‘big deal’ to Sarah and Martha about their rapes, is it possible you were thinking about your cancer and what you have to face all the time? It’s a hell of a lot tougher facing something that threatens your life
right now
than something that happened a year or two ago.
“Maybe you’d like to get some caring from the group, but how can you get it when you come on so tough? You haven’t yet talked about having cancer.” (I had been urging Carlos to reveal to the group that he had cancer, but he was procrastinating: he said he was afraid he’d be pitied, and didn’t want to sabotage his sexual chances with the women members.)
Carlos grinned at me. “Good try, Doc! It makes a lot of sense. You’ve got a good head. But I’ll be honest—the thought of my cancer never entered my mind. Since we stopped chemotherapy two months ago, I go days at a time without thinking of the cancer. That’s goddamn good, isn’t it—to forget it, to be free of it, to be able to live a normal life for a while?”
Good question! I thought. Was it good to forget? I wasn’t so sure. Over the months I had been seeing Carlos, I had discovered that I could chart, with astonishing accuracy, the course of his cancer by noting the things he thought about. Whenever his cancer worsened and he was actively facing death, he rearranged his life priorities and became more thoughtful, compassionate, wiser. When, on the other hand, he was in remission, he was guided, as he put it, by his pecker and grew noticeably more coarse and shallow.
I once saw a newspaper cartoon of a pudgy lost little man saying, “Suddenly, one day in your forties or fifties, everything becomes clear. . . . And then it goes away again!” That cartoon was apt for Carlos, except that he had not one, but
repeated
episodes of clarity—and they always went away again. I often thought that if I could find a way to keep him continually aware of his death and the “clearing” that death effects, I could help him make some major changes in the way he related to life and to other people.
It was evident from the specious way he was speaking today, and a couple of days ago in the group, that his cancer was quiescent again, and that death, with its attendant wisdom, was far out of mind.
I tried another tack. “Carlos, before you started the group I tried to explain to you the basic rationale behind group therapy. Remember how I emphasized that whatever happens in the group can be used to help us work in therapy?” He nodded.
I continued, “And that one of the most important principles of groups is that the group is a miniature world—whatever environment we create in the group reflects the way we have chosen to live? Remember that I said that each of us establishes
in
the group the
same kind of social world we have in our real life?
”
He nodded again. He was listening.
“Now, look what’s happening to you in the group! You started with a number of people with whom you might have developed close relationships. And when you began, the two of us were in agreement that you needed to work on ways of developing relationships. That was why you began the group, remember? But now, after only six weeks, all the members and at least one of the co-therapists are thoroughly pissed at you. And it’s your own doing. You’ve done
in
the group what you do
outside
of the group! I want you to answer me honestly: Are you satisfied? Is this what you want from your relationships with others?”
“Doc, I understand completely what you’re saying, but there’s a bug in your argument. I don’t give a shit, not one shit, about the people in the group. They’re not real people. I’m never going to associate with losers like that. Their opinion doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t
want
to get closer to them.”
I had known Carlos to close up completely like this on other occasions. He would, I suspected, be more reasonable in a week or two, and under ordinary circumstances I would simply have been patient. But unless something changed quickly, he would either drop out of the group or would, by next week, have ruptured beyond repair his relationships with the other members. Since I doubted very much, after this charming incident, whether I’d ever be able to persuade another group therapist to accept him, I persevered.
“I hear those angry and judgmental feelings, and I know you really feel them. But, Carlos, try to put brackets around them for a moment and see if you can get in touch with anything else. Both Sarah and Martha were in a great deal of pain. What other feelings did you have about them? I’m not talking about major or predominant feelings, but about any other flashes you had.”
“I know what you’re after. You’re doing your best for me. I want to help you, but I’d be making up stuff. You’re putting feelings into my mouth. Right here, this office, is the one place I can tell the truth, and the truth is that, more than anything else, what I want to do with those two cunts in the group is to fuck them! I meant it when I said that if rape were legal, I’d do it! And I know just where I’d start!”
Most likely he was referring to Sarah, but I did not ask. The last thing I wanted to do was enter into that discourse with him. Probably there was some important oedipal competition going on between the two of us which was making communication more difficult. He never missed an opportunity to describe to me in graphic terms what he would like to do to Sarah, as though he considered that we were rivals for her. I know he believed that the reason I had earlier dissuaded him from inviting Sarah out was that I wanted to keep her to myself. But this type of interpretation would be totally useless now: he was far too closed and defensive. If I were going to get through, I would have to use something more compelling.
The only remaining approach I could think of involved that one burst of emotion I had seen in our first session—the tactic seemed so contrived and so simplistic that I could not possibly have predicted the astonishing result it would produce.
“All right, Carlos, let’s consider this ideal society you’re imagining and advocating—this society of legalized rape. Think now, for a few minutes, about your daughter. How would it be for her living in the community—being available for legal rape, a piece of ass for whoever happens to be horny and gets off on force and seventeen-year-old girls?”
Suddenly Carlos stopped grinning. He winced visibly and said simply, “I wouldn’t like that for her.”
“But where would she fit, then, in this world you’re building? Locked up in a convent? You’ve got to make a place where she can live: that’s what fathers do—they build a world for their children. I’ve never asked you before—what do you really want for her?”
“I want her to have a loving relationship with a man and have a loving family.”
“But how can that happen if her father is advocating a world of rape? If you want her to live in a loving world, then it’s up to you to construct that world—and you have to start with your own behavior. You can’t be outside your own law—that’s at the base of every ethical system.”
The tone of the session had changed. No more jousting or crudity. We had grown deadly serious. I felt more like a philosophy or religious teacher than a therapist, but I knew that this was the proper trail. And these were things I should have said before. He had often joked about his own inconsistency. I remember his once describing with glee a dinner-table conversation with his children (they visited him two or three times a year) when he informed his daughter that he wanted to meet and approve any boy she went out with. “As for
you,
” pointing to his son, “
you
get all the ass you can!”